Rather than shovel ever more taxpayer dollars at administratively bloated post-secondary institutions, why not privatize them so they are free to allocate resources based on actual demand from employers? Otherwise, they’ll just continue to give gender studies the same priority as engineering.
Ontario’s universities and colleges are looking for billion-dollar funding boosts in the province’s upcoming budget, investments they are framing as critical to Premier Doug Ford’s plan to “protect Ontario” from tariff impacts by strengthening domestic capabilities.
The Council of Ontario Universities says in its pre-budget submission that its institutions are at “a breaking point” and they are calling for an additional $1.2 billion in operating funding next year, with that amount increasing to $1.6 billion by 2028-29.
Related (from Kate): Up to 25 percent of U.S. colleges may close soon, Brandeis president warns
For the same reason that primary education charter schools haven’t been the fix everyone thought they’d be — see the commie charter school Renee Good loved so well. A privatized school doesn’t always equate a good one to have in one’s society.
It has some potential as one avenue of remediation, but it isn’t a cure all, and is subject to some of the same ills afflicting public schools.
It’s putting a band aid on a sucking chest wound.
Higher education needs an entire rethink and re-engineering. In my opinion, there are only two streams of education – skilled worker training and non-marketable degrees.
Skilled training includes trades, technology, medicine (doctor’s, nurses, lab techs), engineering, applied mathematics and physics, medical and technology research, business degrees. Those careers have real and tangible value to society and government funding should reflect that value. Speed up the education time by not requiring them to take basket weaving courses at university – it’s a waste of time and money.
Non-marketable training is everything else like political science, grievance studies, history, literature, language studies, etc. Those have limited value to society and should not be funded by taxpayers at all. Through most of history these degrees were the playground of bored rich kids who did not need marketable skills. Let the student’s parents fund their vanity degrees.
Trade schools would be a good option in a suite of remedies. The entire institution should probably be burnt to the ground at this point and re-made, restored really with some improvements.
History, literature, language — the classical liberal arts — are of cultural value and necessary (and are easily taught at a trade school; ask me how I know this). That’s why the marxists went there when they took over education, and there was a good reason for that. It’s the reason why you don’t really have a real Humanities department anymore; instead, they have these frankenstein “studies” programs (ask me how I know about that).
I agree that there is value humanities and social sciences, but only limited value. Society certainly does not need 10s of thousands of humanities and social sciences graduates per year.
The oversupply has, imo, been a driving factor in the massive growth of unnecessary departments in business and government bureaucracy and unnecessary government funded research. Even with such hiring, the soft science middle and working class graduates struggle to find careers in their feld that both pay them a good wage and pay off their student loans. They don’t have the social connections of the upper class kids to find high paying jobs.
I’m not saying humanities and social sciences university education shouldn’t be available but it needs to drastically shrink and be self funded. You don’t actually need a professor or degree to understand humanities and social sciences, you only need to be able to read and think for yourself (university does a poor job of the latter).
Far more than you think.
What does the liberal arts (the real ones) teach? About a civilization’s culture, its history…everything. And done correctly it teaches a person to think broadly.
Civilizations have to remember what they are in order to protect them.
I had the same arguments with the STEM fluffers back in the day (over 30 years ago): refuse to protect the humanities (which didn’t happen) and eventually the sciences will be next, and your blessed ‘muh scientific logic, muh reason!’ will mean NOTHING!
And look at us now!
I rest my case.
I counter than humanities and social science, in its current form, is ruining our cultural history. Not sure there’s anything that hasn’t already been studied to death. After running out of useful research to study, it’s now the study of niche fetishes.
To your comment below: thank you for making my point. Liberal arts (classic) were ignored, and look what it got us.
Thank you.
Is not the life of an engineer and mechanic worth enriching them with beauty, culture?
Must we have to choose?
I was just about to type something very similar, but you saved me the time Jane. We have stopped educating our children about the true advancements in human civilization … by reframing ALL Western/Christian civilization as a genocidal evil.
Christ said that those who lead children astray should be dropped into the Marianas trench attached to a millstone. IMHO that wouldn’t be a half bad solution to the current education “professionals”
Yes, STEM students, and even Trade schoolers need a FULL, well rounded education. A truthful education … not glossed over one way or the other … just truth.
Lots of very good points in this thread. The current university system pays professors based on seniority as per the usual lucrative union contracts. They don’t pay based on actual demand for your academic specialty, so there’s no incentive for instructors to shift their area of expertise to where it is actually needed. If a free market for education were allowed to exist, instructors in the humanities would get paid much less than those in the sciences, for instance. That reflects the much higher level of study and attention to detail needed to become proficient in fields like science. If a history professor makes an error about the Reformation, that’s not catastrophic. If an engineering professor teaches the wrong formula about steel stresses, a building could fall down and kill people.
Now I feel compelled to ask “How do you know this”?
Because I was once a professor..of English Literature…and I was blackballed for speaking out against the studies-ification of my department and the rejection of the canonical works. Got to endure a real Chicom style struggle session as well as not getting my contract renewed (much easier to fire you with that one, by the way). It’s a wonder they didn’t hang a placard around my neck and parade me around; I think they would have liked to.
Oh, at that time I had just gotten off working for a program to enact “Writing Across the Curriculum” (nice in theory and could have been in practice — some STEM guys can’t write their way out of a paper bag; but helping them to communicate better was not what it was really about; it was to interject ideology into the STEM departments, what’s noticeably happened in the past 20-30 years). I knew what was going to happen to the STEM departments; I did warn a few of them — oh no, that could never happen. Well, it did. Surprise!!!
Where do you think “Trust the Science” got it’s start? How well has that worked out?
A snippet of a Q&A session at a conference I went to:
Presenter: The science departments (secondary and elementary were being discussed) will realize that they need to be teaching a more diversified and culturally sensitive curriculum.
Attendee: What if the instructors don’t go for it?
Presenter: We’ll make them. (that’s what they said; that was over a decade ago)
It was…notable; that’s why I still remember it.
Sorry, that was about how I know about what happened to STEM.
I taught classes to a bunch of laid off workers and veterans going through a tech college program — survey classes should never have gone away. We had quite an enjoyable time; it was refreshing to have people from a non-academic track background, and quite a few of them really enjoyed some of the literature we studied — it’s always good to encourage people to realize they can do more than watch TV; about their culture.
And because it was a survey class for a bunch of mechanics and the like…nobody cared what reading material I used (the last classes I got to really plan my own syllabi)…so of course I got to teach the canonical..stuff.
Sounds like you certainly were “done dirty” as the kids say.
Having worked in industrial settings, trades and tech people are generally easier to work with because they aren’t pretentious, social climbing snobs. OTOH, there’s a few that could have made a full time career for a mental health therapist and behavioural psychologist.
I wanted to ask that same question. Thank you, Jane, for your answer. You were correct, nowadays math is racist.
By the way: the ‘snobby’ liberal arts students are the way they are because they have been taught to be that way — and I could go on about the sad decay of the arts blah, blah, blah.
However, let us not forget the not so subtle snobbery of the technocrat and the specialist — who are just as bad (and just as ignorant) as any blue haired Arts major. Perhaps just more palatable, but just as bad.
Perhaps if both gender studies major and chemist had been made to read Asimov or Austen with an eye towards comprehension…
Austen to Asimov ? Wow … that is a spectacular range of Literature. Just the kind of Professor who NEEDS to be FIRED! How dare you teach kids to think … and … to feel.
My daughter has a masters degree in English, and was considering a Ph.D, but realised she would spend a few years in abject poverty becoming an expert in some esoteric corner of English Literature that nobody cares about. She abandoned that idea and went to U of T law school and is now a lawyer on Bay St, making good money.
A degree is simply a stepping stone to a defined career. In her case English got her into Law School, which got her a good career. I have an Aeronautical Engineering degree and it gave me a good life. My son has much the same degree as mine and he is now a pilot with Air Canada.
My other daughter went to Tech College and is now a Master Electrician.
Focus on the desired career, and determine what is needed to get there. There are far too many useless degrees for which there is no obvious career path.
Some of us like to work at things because we love them; money isn’t that important, or at least it isn’t such a precious commodity to me that I feel the need to chase after it — can’t take it with you after all.
And one can always have more than one job if one has more than one skillset — diversity really can be a strength sometimes.
Maybe people should care — the collapse of our societies is perhaps because we got into the mindset that we shouldn’t, no? At the very least it was a strategic mistake to care so little that, well, what you have now is indoctrinating your children about Kevin’s Two Dads rather than Treasure Island; actual scientific research rather than following the money straight to the Green New Deal and that uh, vaccine.
Or perhaps not; it’s just my opinion.
Jane … you may claim to have a face for radio (I doubt it, because I cannot imagine you with a resting bitch face) … but you have a mind and a heart for the ages. Your thoughts and opinions are … well … beautiful. Looks are overrated if not paired with smarts and a moral compass … you know … like Kate.
Ontario is currently a have not province so no problem, just up the transfer payments from Alberta and it won’t cost them a dime. Easy peasy
Hopefully the days of Alberta funding libtard stupidity will be drawing to a close real soon.
Great idea… just dial up Daddy Alberta and we’ll take care of it.
possible /sarc
I’m an Ontarian, but I am hoping that Alberta gets its act together and finally leaves because I need a place to retreat to from all of this madness. Canada is a failed state. I loved it here so much. I was such a nice place that is being sytematically dismantled on purpose and the sheep and lemmings are all clapoping the distruction on. I knew in the 70’s that the LPC would destroy Canada because they did not love the place. Now is the endgame. The beginning of the end. When will it end? Like Hemingway said when asked how he went bankrupt, ” Slowly, then all of a sudden.” So soon, very soon. Protect your wealth. Get it into land and tangible assests.
I don’t have the numbers (nobody does, there isn’t a count and all the signup sheets are spread between hundreds of those people collecting signatures…) for those who have signed the demand for a separation referendum in Alberta later this year.
I am very optimistic, but nobody wants to be the cocky one and say we’ve met the standard of 177k in 120 days, while some of the X/Twitter talk leans to the possibility that we’ll exceed that by multiples.
Canada is going to be a very different country after this, and I have no idea where the Marx Carnage thinks he’s going to gain the funds to buy all those F-35’s, or the Saab Gripens, or as the above post mentions, where the universities are going to gain the funds to even stay open? Kate above has posted that 25% of universities may close in the next few years, while I think maybe 1/2 in the next decade. The Ai wave will kick them to the curb, and that learning curve may be more steep than they’ve ever encountered in their lives. There’s not a lot of marxist feminism intrasex factories being opened to hire all of them.
25% is a good start, 50% is better. The physical building itself would still be useful, maybe Mike Rowe would help
in reconstructing the educationally redirected institutions.
“…why not privatize them…?”
Because it is much easier to steal from public institutions. No shareholders, no skin in the game, and they can’t go bankrupt. Just the bottomless well of taxpayer money to draw from, forever.
Or until it dries up. Which might be soon, given recent events.
Will privatizing actually do that though?
About 10 years ago, the Uni of Calgary changed their department funding model. They did the exact opposite of what you suggested:
They defunded engineering and other high-paying departments, and gave more taxpayer subsidies to the gender studies and “arts & humanities” departments. Their justification is that the engineers were likely to be employed and get higher paying jobs therefore they could afford tuition.
That’s the current model, but would privately-funding the uni’s actually change things?
Many colleges and universities absolutely DESERVE to be closed. They put out cretins with completely worthless degrees…..one that immediately comes to mind is Mount Royal “University” in Calgary.
“It is the classic fallacy of our time that a moron run through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will thereby cease to be a moron.” H. L. Mencken
In Canada, the cost of university administration has roughly doubled compared to other university costs over the last 30 years. You would think it would be the opposite — as administration has become increasingly computerized, efficiency should go up and costs should go down. But no.
At the same time, power and responsibility has shifted from faculty to administration. Instead of administration assisting faculty, now faculty is seen as answering to administration.
The central problem, I suspect, is that administrators are the ones setting budgets, so of course they continually prioritize administration over annoying distractions like instruction and research.
Provincial governments need to step in and set limits to administrative costs. Currently, total administrative salaries are 60% of faculty salaries. A statutory limit of 40% sounds about right.
Every time provincial governments try to exert some form of control over spending, the universities generally find ingenious ways to do an end run around their efforts, while stoking an “us versus them” model to describe the relationship between students and the government.
Look what gender studies has done to Minneapolis…..damaged goods
C’mon now.
Stupid Mewling Quims and Nutless Cowards can’t get their Marxist certs from just any old place.
I read this a month or so ago, but the unemployment rate for someone in Canada, with any two-year certificate, is lower than someone with a bachelor’s degree. This is the first-time this has happened in a long time.
The introduction of AI has made much of the standard university education obsolete. I say this asxa retired economics professor. Knowledge is now obtainable from AI. AI will soon design standardized tests, to test students as to much course knowledge they retained from AI courses.